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2011 08

The Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis at the ANU has put together a Shadow RBA Board:

Made up of senior Australian economists, the shadow board was set up as a research project by The Australian National University to look at interest rate setting by monetary policymakers.Director of the Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis at ANU Professor Shaun Vahey said board members were asked to rank their preferred target interest rate, and to give the probability that each interest rate is appropriate.“Each economist gave a percentage value for how much they preferred each interest rate using an electronic voting system,” he said.

“The board members are not forecasting actual RBA board behavior, but are considering what they believe is the appropriate rate.”

Of course, what you believe to be the appropriate rate should be the same as your prediction for the actual interest rate outcome, unless you think the RBA Board is behaving inappropriately! Not surprisingly, at the August meeting, every member of the Shadow Board except Shaun assigned the single highest weight to the current official cash rate setting, endorsing the current stance of monetary policy.

This highlights a major point of difference between the Shadow RBA Board and its overseas namesakes. The US Shadow Open Market Committee and the UK’s Shadow Monetary Policy Committee were established specifically to critique current policy from a monetarist perspective, as well as advocating reform of existing monetary institutions. The members of the Shadow RBA Board for the most part share with the RBA the standard New Keynesian framework for monetary policy, which is unlikely to lead Shadow Board members to adopt a radically different policy stance, even in a probabilistic setting. This is not to say that the New Keynesian model is an inappropriate framework. As Ed Nelson has shown, the basic features of the New Keynesian model can be derived explicitly from quantity theory identities.

One possibly unintended consequence of the Shadow RBA Board will be to hold it members accountable for their policy prescriptions. Having confidently announced in a press release that ‘the current interest rate is at the correct level,’ it will now be more difficult for members of the Shadow RBA Board to retrospectively criticise the stance of monetary policy. Unlike the US and UK shadow policymaking bodies, the Shadow RBA Board may find themselves locked-in to defend the official policy position.

farmers such as Simon Tiller have a clear message to any foreigner interested in his multi-million-dollar operation: come on down.

The 29-year-old father of two would not say where the “considerable overseas interest” was coming from for his $15.5 million wheat, barley and canola concern east of Esperance, 700km southeast of Perth, but he is adamant foreign investment is pivotal to keeping Australian agriculture strong and productive.

“Can you imagine the mining industry getting off the ground without foreign investment? It’s a sophisticated global economy and we need to keep pace,” he told The Weekend Australian.

While the West Australian Farmers Federation has warned about the dangers of “large-scale Chinese ownership” following moves on Australia’s sugar industry and rumours China was seeking 80,000ha of WA farmland, grain producers such as Mr Tiller around Esperance won’t have a bar of any “scaremongering”...

Foreign investment was good for farmers who wanted to sell - it gave them an out - and those that didn’t as it “kept values rising”.

Every additional person requires less land than the previous one. That’s an important statement. Not only does it say we’re hardwired for density, it also says a group becomes 15 percent more efficient at extracting resources from the land every time their population doubles. Each successive doubling in turn frees up 15 percent more resources to be directed towards something other than hunting and gathering. In other words, complex societies didn’t just evolve as a way to cope with high-density—they evolved in part because of high density.

Bloomberg is seemingly the only news organisation to have thought that the introduction of the Parliamentary Budget Office legislation is worthy of note. The Bloomberg report suggests that the federal opposition have unrealistic expectations for the new body:

“We want an independent source,” opposition Finance spokesman Andrew Robb told the Melbourne Age newspaper last month. “I’d expect next time there will be no debate over our costings.”

As I argued in this piece for The Drum, it would certainly be desirable to put an end to pointless partisan bickering over costing assumptions and instead focus on the merits of the policies being proposed apart from their assumed implications for the budget bottom line. Unfortunately, the political process is such that politicians cannot admit to being wrong and they are unlikely to accept contrary opinions from the PBO, no matter how independent. My guess is the PBO will very quickly disappoint the expectations of the opposition and independents and will itself become embroiled in partisan conflict. This was the Canadian experience, discussed by Peter Reith here. Reith seems to think we can do better, but gives us no real reason to think that we will.

Michael Lewis quotes a senior Bundesbank official on selling the gold stock to meet an ECB insolvency:

The E.C.B. itself might face insolvency, which would mean turning for funds to its solvent member governments, led by Germany. (The senior official at the Bundesbank told me they already have thought about how to deal with the request. “We have 3,400 tons of gold,” he said. “We are the only country that has not sold its original allotment from the [late 1940s]. So we are covered to some extent.”)

Liberty and Society is a unique conference program for undergraduates, postgraduates and recent graduates over the age of 18 who live in Australia, New Zealand or the South Pacific. The goal of the Liberty and Society conferences is to create an intellectual environment where ideas and opinions about what makes a free society can be discussed, argued and learnt.

Liberty and Society is for young people who may be questioning the standard answers they are getting regarding social, political and economic issues. You may not see yourself as a fitting into the ‘left’ or ‘right’ mould. This is an opportunity to consider the classical liberal perspective. Classical liberalism promotes individual freedom, private property, limited government and free trade.

Students from every Australian state and New Zealand attend. Formal and informal discussions on economics, political thought, law and social policy dominated the weekend interspersed with arguments about foreign policy, education and politics. Generous scholarships allow everyone to apply.

Join us for an intellectual experience that may change the way you think about the world.

An unnamed federal cabinet minister, quoted in The Monthly’s profile of Australian editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell:

“The Oz doesn’t report the policy issues. It just reports that big business is shitting on the government, and Abbott is shitting on the government, it reports politics in any way that shits on the government, day after day.” Whether it’s climate change, asylum seekers, industrial relations, the schools building program or the National Broadband Network: “It’s just ‘let’s shit on the government’, every single fucking day.”

I have an article at The Conversation arguing that failure to raise the US debt ceiling need not have led to sovereign debt default:

It was the failure of US politicians to acknowledge the policy implications of long-run budget sustainability that decided the recent ratings action by Standard & Poor’s. Failing to raise the debt ceiling would not have led to debt default if US politicians had taken the necessary decisions to put the budget on a sustainable footing. Raising the debt ceiling kicks the problem down the road and creates the risk of a far more serious fiscal crisis in future.

A fiscally responsible US president would have joined with responsible members of Congress in refusing to sign a further increase in the debt ceiling. The Obama administration could have used the unthinkable prospect of debt default to force spendthrift members of Congress to reduce government spending and stabilise expectations for the future path of net debt that are currently weighing on economic growth.

Congress and the Administration know that if they lead the US to default on its obligations, the American people will sweep them from office. For politicians, incentives don’t come much stronger than that.

My CIS colleague Adam Creighton has been making similar points in Crikey, although I’m far better disposed towards quantitative easing than he is.

I knew absolutely nothing about John Quiggin, until someone asked me to write a short review of Zombie Economics for the Journal of Economic Literature. The timing was good, as I was about to leave for Australia to give a plenary talk at the Australian Conference of Economists in Canberra in July. I could read the book on the plane (though a trip from St. Louis to Chicago would actually be sufficient) and might actually come across the man himself, or news of him, at the conference.

By the time I got to Canberra, I had read Zombie Economics, and had written a draft of my review which panned the damn thing.

The review we commissioned for the CIS journal Policy was a little more friendly.

I would call this evidence suggestive rather than definitive, but interesting nonetheless:

The chart below compares the pay of legislators in 13 countries with those countries’ fiscal space. The best “deal” for the taxpayer comes at the top left of the chart, where legislators are relatively low paid but the country has a large fiscal space. The worst deal comes at the bottom right of the chart, where pay is high but fiscal space low.

My CIS colleague Adam Creighton has suggested that politicians’ pay should be a fixed multiple of three times the median wage, ensuring that politicians’ incentives are aligned with those of the rest of the population. The linked chart suggests that this multiple is a little high by international standards. I would further modify Adam’s suggestion and tie politicians’ pay to a fixed multiple of the median real wage as an added anti-inflationary incentive.

Ricardian Ambivalence highlights the real cost of the CPRS Mark II in the presence of political capital constraints:

The fact is the government can’t open a new tax battle while the carbon tax is taking all the oxygen. This is the hidden cost of the carbon tax. Not only will it do nothing to change the climate it is also crowding out a discussion of controversial but important policy debates.

The government’s apparent determination to die in a ditch over the CPRS Mark II is puzzling from a public choice perspective. There is nothing wrong with dying in a ditch for something worthwhile, but this is not typical behavior for politicians and begs the question why they don’t do it for something more worthwhile if they really are putting principle ahead of political expediency. Implementing the entirety of the Henry review would surely come at lower political cost and could even gain bipartisan political support.

Rudd and Turnbull realised they had to form a policy cartel on the CPRS to avoid it consuming them both. Neither wanted to fight an election on the issue. It was a bipartisan political conspiracy that nearly paid-off. A policy cartel is consistent with the median voter model. The CPRS Mk I would be operating today were it not for the coalition revolt against Turnbull’s leadership. Turnbull’s judgment that this would be electorally fatal to the Coalition was spectacularly wrong. Breaking the Rudd-Turnbull CPRS policy cartel destroyed Rudd and nearly won the Coalition the 2010 election.